How to test your programs with Unicode characters in multiple languages on Windows 2000

How to test your Unicode program with foreign-language characters on Windows 2000

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Windows 2000 makes it really easy to enter Unicode characters from other languages using IMEs (input method
editors) and the on-screen keyboard. You can use these features to test your programs and make sure they will work
on other languages of Windows and with the full range of available Unicode characters. You can test with multiple
languages by following a few steps:

Enable the system to read and write files in the languages you want to test with.

Enable keyboard layouts for the languages you want to test with.

Change your dialogs to use a new system font, MS Shell Dlg 2.

Enter characters into your app using the new keyboard layouts or the Charmap program.

Note that you must have a Unicode build of your app. If you try this with an ANSI build, you can only enter
characters that are in the code page of the language of your OS. If you try entering other characters, they will
either show up as question marks, or different letters that are missing diacritics.

Enabling foreign languages

The first thing to do is configure the system to read and write files in other languages. Log in as an administrator
and open the Regional Options control panel. At the bottom of the first page, there is a checklist box with a list
of languages, as shown here.

Check all the languages that you want to test with. For this example, check Japanese and Vietnamese, and click
OK. Windows will install fonts, IMEs, and other necessary files and then reboot.

Adding foreign-language keyboard layouts

After the reboot, open the Keyboard control panel and click the Input Locales tab. Click the Add button and
then pick a language in the Input Locale combo box. For this example, choose Japanese. The IME combo box should
show "Japanese Input System (MS-IME 2000)" as shown here:

Click OK to save your changes. There should now be a language indicator icon in the tray, which will show the
native language of the OS (for example, "EN" if you're using English Windows). Pressing Left Alt+Shift
rotates your keyboard language among the languages you set in the Keyboard control panel. You can also left-click
the language indicator to get a menu of all the installed languages.

Changing dialog fonts

Now that the system is set up to let you enter foreign-language characters, you need to tweak your dialogs so
they can display the characters. Windows 2000 has a new system font name, MS Shell Dlg 2. This is
not a real font, but rather a special name the system recognizes. When a dialog is created with this font, the
system substitutes a font that is capable of displaying characters in all of the installed languages. (You can
read about Windows NT font substitution in MSDN under Platform SDK\Windows Base Services\International Features\National
Language Support\About National Language Support\Localization and the Shell Font.) By default this font is Tahoma.
Once you set your dialogs to use this font, they will automatically be able to display any Unicode character from
any installed language. Note that you'll need to edit your .RC files by hand, since you can't set the font to MS
Shell Dlg 2 through the MSVC dialog editor.

Entering foreign-language characters

If you change the keyboard language to Japanese, you'll see the IME in the lower-right corner. Using the IME
requires knowledge of Japanese to enter correct syllables (and teaching Japanese is a little beyond the scope of
this article), so for the purposes of testing you can use Charmap to enter Japanese characters.

To run Charmap, click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and click Character
Map. Select either the MS Mincho or MS Gothic font, and scroll the character list down until you see the Japanese
characters. Double-clicking any character adds it to the edit box at the bottom of the window, and clicking Copy
puts all the characters in the edit box onto the Clipboard. Here is what Charmap looks like after double-clicking
three characters:

After copying the characters to the Clipboard, you can them paste them into any input field in your program.

Another way to enter characters is by using the on-screen keyboard, a new Accessibility feature in Windows 2000.
The on-screen keyboard lets you click buttons with your mouse, instead of hunting for keys on the keyboard. To
open the on-screen keyboard, click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, point to Accessibility, and
click On-Screen Keyboard. The Vietnamese keyboard is shown here:

Other languages will differ, naturally, in the placement of some letters. For Vietnamese, the top row of keys
enters diacritics and accented letters, as well as the two keys between P and backslash. To add a diacritic to
a vowel, type the vowel and then the diacritic. For example, to enter the name Nguyen, type "Nguy" as
normal letters. To enter the e (which has both a circumflex and a tilde), press the 3 key (for ê) and then
press the 7 key to add the tilde.

When you want to use the on-screen keyboard, click in the window that you want to receive the keystrokes, and
then click in the on-screen keyboard window. When you click buttons on the keyboard, the keystrokes will be sent
to the window with the focus.

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About the Author

Michael lives in sunny Mountain View, California. He started programming with an Apple //e in 4th grade, graduated from UCLA with a math degree in 1994, and immediately landed a job as a QA engineer at Symantec, working on the Norton AntiVirus team. He pretty much taught himself Windows and MFC programming, and in 1999 he designed and coded a new interface for Norton AntiVirus 2000.
Mike has been a a developer at Napster and at his own lil' startup, Zabersoft, a development company he co-founded with offices in Los Angeles and Odense, Denmark. Mike is now a senior engineer at VMware.

He also enjoys his hobbies of playing pinball, bike riding, photography, and Domion on Friday nights (current favorite combo: Village + double Pirate Ship). He would get his own snooker table too if they weren't so darn big! He is also sad that he's forgotten the languages he's studied: French, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese.

Hi,
We are working on a file system to which we 've recently added the foreign language support(chinese korean russian and many more). My question is that we want to display the content of the file system and the file names are the language characters. DOS prompt do not support foreign language characters.
We 've installed the language support for individual character on the Window -XP. So in order to display the language characters we 've to write a windows application which can display the characters on a Window/Dialog or some editor capable of showing the characters .
Can u please suggest a suitable approach or any indications.

Not sure what you mean by "DOS prompt do not support foreign language characters". Filenames are stored in Unicode, so if you have the language support and its fonts installed (from the Regional ctrl panel applet) then the display will work (as long as you use a font like Tahoma that contains the characters - do not use MS Sans Serif).

Hi mike,
we are making a vc++ application unicode compliant.I am changing the resource file to implement pseudo localisation purpose.Not all the characters are displayed (its not that a typical character set eg some Greek characters are displayed , others are not).But nowhere are ??? displayed.Also the font set for individual menus and dialogs was MS San Serif.I tried changing it to 'Arial Unicode MS'.Also changed the reg value of 'MS shell DLG 2' to 'Arial Unicode MS'. What should i do? note: i have put all L"" before all unicode strings.

Amit
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."

Hi,
We are working on a file system to which we 've recently added the foreign language support(chinese korean russian and many more). My question is that we want to display the content of the file system and the file names are the language characters. DOS prompt do not support foreign language characters.
We 've installed the language support for individual character on the Window -XP. So in order to display the language characters we 've to write a windows application which can display the characters on a Window/Dialog or some editor capable of showing the characters .
Can u please suggest a suitable approach or any indications.

I am working on internationalization of an application and tried using some of the functions that I could see as relevant in this context:

1)IsValidLocale() returns always true, with my 2nd argument being LCID_INSTALLED
2)Tried also using the pair EnumUILanguages() and the associated callback required, BUT could not find anywhere an example of what this call back should have inside it….

I found that caret movement in a rich edit box (1.0) when containing Japanese text is erratic. On investigation found that "normal" SendMessage messages like "EM_POSFROMCHAR" and "EM_LINEINDEX" are returning improper values.
The whole setup works OK when English text is used.

I found that the Japanese text being displayed in the rich edit control are not composed of a single character (i.e DBCS). But does it automatically follow that rich edit control (1.0) will not be able to follow the exact caret movement style?

When testing japanese characters i see some that change there direction after i finish typing them - for example a "1" will roll over look like a "-" (it kind of falls over). I wonder if this is a bug in my software?

Hi!
I'm Phan Van Long, I from Viet Nam , i've learn "Han Nom" which is an very old language and "Nom" characters is look like chiness but they are not chiness
now i going to program a software which let us type Nom characters into any editor software , I want to creat a IME like Microsoft's ones
Please show me how can i do
thank!
Phan Van Long

Any idea how can I use an ANSI build and create resources
in a language different from the list supplied by VC++ 6 ?
(That is, the list of languages and dialects that is shown
for example in the "Insert Resource Copy" dialog).

"MS Shell Dlg 2" only works with Windows 2000/XP. For beeing compatible with Windows 9x it is better to use "MS Shell Dlg" with the DS_SHELLFONT (this is DS_SETFONT | DS_FIXEDSYS) This flag will use "MS Shell Dlg 2" in Windows 2000/XP